Everyone complains about grind, but I personally can't see it in the game. Someone has already complained that it is eaten and bathed every day in the game. Look at our lives, we also do the same eating, showering and working all the time. Life is made up of repetition and the game should reflect that, otherwise it wouldn't be a real game. I personally think it's very easy to finish (I personally don't use hints or cheats). Personally, I would have liked it to be much harder. The game would be perfect if you could only play it online, significantly less or even better no hints, only 5 auto saves at the beginning of the day, no manual saves, the saves on the server to eliminate any possibility of manipulating the saves. In my opinion cheats spoil all the fun and I want to have fun.
What many people see as 'grind' is the amount of waiting and do nice things to the girls to keep their mood up. It's not
that grindy, but it can get very repetitive. One has to accept, that this game is based on it or he will never be happy with it.
Waiting for the 'right time' is where many fail, when the hints are not written well. And a hint like 'I have to wait for ...' is
not entertaining, that means that either something has to happen or one has do do repetitive fillers to raise mood or something.
Personally I find it quite annoying that so many game have stats in the first place. Mood, Influence, Corruption, Lust, Fear ...
Gee, what for? They only stretch play time since they have to get raised or lowered.
What happened to good old adventure style gameplay? A general direction what to do, stuff to pick up and use in certain places, events. Worked in the past. Then again most of these games were rather short or A+ productions.
If you want people to stay in one game for months and years, you need to keep them busy with repetitive actions and of course there's a task list needed because they will forget what they were doing after waiting for months for the next update.
That's one main reason, why I never play alphas or betas in founded kickstarter projects, I prefer finished games.
The current update I didn't even touch. For one path there is too little to do and I have no intention of playing all three at the same time. I may or may not start with a fake friendship or whatever once I finished one path. I mean ... who with his mind in the right place would read three books at the same time? 10 pages from one book, 10 from the next, 10 from the third, then back to the first one. I see more in the story of a game than a way to get to lewd scenes.